<p>You are commenting on the former, and the latter, I hope. :p (If the latter, I think you misinterpret me -- I should qualify that by "borrowing", I mean recycling the essays I wrote for some apps and basically re-edited it to suit others).</p>
<p>I'm somewhat surprised nevertheless. As far as I know, an honour code violation is, "an honor offense is defined as an intentional act of lying, cheating or stealing which warrants permanent dismissal from the University." (The</a> Honor Committee) </p>
<p>I don't think posting your essay is any of the three. It involves a bit of pride, I suppose (which can be reasonable, right?), and it seems it exists as a trend for other CC subfora. I think people fear this becoming a sort of "sell your essays" sort of site, which I don't want either. As far as I recall, the only why people refrain from posting their essays BEFORE they submit them in the essays forum is that they don't want people leeching off of them before they've submitted them.</p>
<p>Anyway, I'm just really curious about the kind of writing styles people have. I sorta want to know what the personalities of my peers will be like. :) (The University posts</a> essays too, or at least excerpts, so posting topics must at least be kosher.) </p>
<p>I'm a bit of an intellectual property libertarian-- while I'm firmly against plagiarism, my philosophy is that we don't own our ideas, only expressions of them (hence</a> the idea-expression dichotomy in intellectual property law) -- our brains are merely vectors for these little information entities (in a "selfish gene" sort of way, except replace "gene" with "idea" or "meme"). If someone gets inspired by a topic I took 3 hours to conceive (indeed, I kept on redefining the focus of many of my essays when I realised many of essay foci weren't working that well), so be it. I don't believe the person who gets inspired is getting a free ride -- far from it: he or she will have to adapt the idea to his or her own context to be useful. Who is to say I own the idea I conceived? That idea has been drawn subconsciously from the numerous books I read. My writing style is the subconscious synthesis of the styles of my favourite authors, my teachers, and my peers, stored in my linguistic faculties. These people in turn, were inspired by those before them, who were in turn inspired by those before them, and so on. Would we have airplanes if not for the inspiration of birds, which Nature took tens of millions of years to engineer? And to think, because we "stole" Nature's inspiration, within a century we have made spacecraft! Where did ideas originally come from, but from the constant thrum of information in the universe, which are in turn regulated by physical laws? </p>
<p>To think! In the five to ten hours I took to write my constructive speeches for a particular Lincoln-Douglas debate resolution, I drew upon the ideas of a man (Immanuel Kant) who probably took years to formulate a theory for the Categorical Imperative! And yet, I should hope not to be accused of an honour code violation.</p>
<p>A lot of essays I have noted use the "metaphorical dialogue" technique -- a fictional dialogue between the narrator (which could be the author) and some entity which in the process reveals things about both the narrator and the entity (or some other subject). The first one I remember used a dialogue between a narrator and the personification of Innocence, and how the loss of innocence is required to make righteous actions righteous (if you do the right thing without knowing the difference between right and wrong, can you really say you're a righteous person?) and how Innocence told the narrator she shouldn't be so sad at losing her after primary school. </p>
<p>Later on, I read other essays where the narrators (in the form of their authors) engage in fictional conversations with historical figures, mythological-but-culturally-important figures, personifications of other things, and so forth. It was a technique that I didn't really use until last year, and in fact I ended up using the technique because I was inspired by how other college essays used it. I ended up using it (for the 500-word UVA essay) concerning a REAL conversation I had with authority figures in the Singaporean government. Of course I couldn't remember the conversation word for word [it had been four hours long] so I paraphrased it from memory, as well as adding details to make the conflict between my libertarian values and the Singaporean government's authoritarian philosophy clear. It was because I read previous "metaphorical dialogue" essays that I knew what details would be essential for such an essay. </p>
<p>I'd like to think that was not an honour code violation.</p>